Ted Lasso Just Got Fired
"If we’re not having fun, we’re totally screwing up.”
Wearing a blue, half-zip hoodie over a gray T-shirt with khakis and white running shoes while a buoyant funk track played loudly in the auditorium, Pete Carroll looked happier walking to his own professional execution than most people do when they’re on holiday. After 14 seasons, Carroll, one of three coaches ever to win a college national championship and a Super Bowl, was out as head coach of my beloved Seattle Seahawks. “That’s it for now,” he said. “I’m frickin’ jacked. I’m fired up.”
If you know anything about the boundlessly youthful, gum-chomping, 72-year-old coach, that can’t surprise you. We weren’t going to get an old coach grumbling his way into retirement with talk of warriors leaving blood on battlefields. For Pete Carroll, who has often been speculated to be an inspiration for Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso character, “It’s really always been about the fun. … If we’re not having fun, we’re totally screwing up.”
Given the chance to single out one accomplishment that he was most proud of, he did not mention bringing Seattle its first Super Bowl win, that he was going out on a winning season, or that he had turned the Seahawks into a team that consistently won for the last decade-plus, an extraordinary level of consistent success.1 In fact, he didn’t mention football, really.
“We have an extraordinary culture, and I’m really proud of that,” he said. “This is a very special place because of all of that, and I’m grateful for that.”
Let me make a confession here: I never really bought all that. His “always compete” mantra always struck me as B-school positivity. I never read his 2011 book, Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion because, in my arrogance I didn’t think I needed self-help leadership lessons from a football coach. I tolerated Pete Carroll’s unrelenting boosterism because the Seahawks had fun players to root for who won way more often than not. We had Beastmode, Richard “You Mad Bro?” Sherman, and D.K. Metcalf, the NFL’s answer to Dennis Rodman. And when they had fun playing, I had fun cheering them on.
And it wasn’t until his farewell press conference that I understood what he was actually doing. To be fair, he now admits, “It was a total experiment. We had no idea [if it would work].” All along Carroll was building an organization on love and joy. I thought “always compete” was about winning and losing. I was so wrong.
“What’s always been behind the culture is trying to help people find their best, one person at a time,” he said. “And it works. It’s real.”
Wait, what? A football coach is saying that developing young men to be the best versions of themselves was the point, and that winning is the inevitable byproduct? Not “Winning isn’t everything; it's the only thing,” but “All You Need is Love?”
Well, actually, you need self-love first, according to Carroll.
“To me, the essence of being as good as you can be is you gotta figure out who you are,” he said, which means figuring out what your purpose is, what your non-negotiables are, and “what makes you who you are. … [I]f you don’t do the self discovery, then you don’t have the opportunity to be your best because you don’t know who you are yet.”
What the heck is going on? Did Ted Lasso and Friday Night Lights have a baby? Was I expecting life lessons from a football coach that afternoon? No! I just tuned in because ending an era of my sports fandom felt a little sad. I guess I was hoping for one last hit of good feelings from the guy, and here I am suddenly feeling like this is my last chance to hear someone who had been trying to teach me something important all along.
OK, OK. I know myself. Step one. What’s this business about accepting people for who they are? Carroll never made a thing about what color DK dyed his hair or that the press-shy Lynch once spent an entire Super Bowl press session repeating, “I'm Just Here So I Won't Get Fined.” Over and over, players would come to Seattle mid-career and discover, Wait, hold up. It’s cool if I just be myself here?
To Carroll, the team could only be truly successful “if you cared for people deeply, and you loved them for who they were and tried to find the extraordinary uniqueness that made them them and celebrate that and not try to make them something that they’re not,” he said.
That’s the method behind Pete Carroll’s famous pre-practice shenanigans, such as free throw competitions, special videos, and even a canoe trip on Lake Washington. He and his coaches would do anything to surprise the players to heighten their senses and anticipation. “It’s part of making the environment that you work in alive,” he said, “This learning environment was supposed to be like, every day you come in you don’t know what’s going to happen ‘cause I needed to keep you at the very peak of your awareness and focus, so that [the fun] was just part of it.”
Hold up, hold up. “Learning environment”? So by knowing yourself, accepting who the players were, and not letting them know what to expect everyday, you’re creating…? “…a teaching environment,” he said. “It’s teaching, so we’re trying to keep the students alive and thriving in the moments.” When Carroll says, “It’s a constant competition for me, you compete on an everyday basis,” what he’s actually talking about is creating a safe place for an instruction and feedback loop.
Suddenly all the Pete-isms made sense. He’d never put it this way, but he had turned a professional football locker room into an inclusive safe space where Black men were accepted for who they were as individuals. And the point of it was to help them become the best versions of themselves.
“That’s the way I see the world: we’re trying to help each other be as good as we can possibly be, whatever that takes, relentlessly,” he said. “That’s just so you can maximize what each guy has. I’m trying to help him be great, he’s trying to help me be great.”
DID THE SEAHAWKS JUST GET RID OF THE REAL TED LASSO? I know the team is keeping him on as an advisor, but he won’t be coach anymore. The real Ted Lasso might have walked into his last locker room.
But the lessons will continue. Carroll made it a point to maintain good relationships with former players — and repair those that had frayed. Sherman did not try to hide his anger when the team allowed him to leave in free agency. Carroll never stopped loving him back, and recently Sherman has reconciled with the team, bringing back a lot of other former players, too.
Sherman didn’t have any influence with the most-prominent former Seahawk, quarterback Russell Wilson. A couple years ago, frustrated with the play calling that he thought was limiting him, Wilson demanded to the team owner that Carroll and the general manager be fired. Instead, the team traded their star quarterback, a probable future Hall-of-Famer. Wilson ended up publicly humiliated, losing badly with his new team while the Seahawks made the playoffs with his longtime backup. You could excuse Wilson if he never wanted to hear the name “Pete Carroll” again.
But when Carroll unexpectedly lost his job this week, a call was made, and when former players were celebrating their coach at a Seattle-area restaurant Sherman owns with another former player, Wilson unexpectedly walked in. And why wouldn’t he show up for the one coach who always got the best out of him.
Thanks for everything, Coach Lasso, I mean, Coach Carroll, especially for giving me one last chance to hear what you’d been trying to tell me all along.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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